


the bitter cold

by krakoal



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019), Political RPF - Russian 20th c.
Genre: Alternate Universe - More Historical, Angst, Death, Gen, Introspection, Sick Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 14:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20322724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakoal/pseuds/krakoal
Summary: Boris Shcherbina waits through his final winter, and reflects.





	the bitter cold

These winters are becoming more and more difficult, as each one passes.

The cold does not even bring him relief from his occasional flashes of fever; it only serves to stiffen his already fatigued joints, make his heart work harder to move him, tighten his thickening lungs, and to exacerbate his near-constant tremors. The cold is so barely tolerable that he tips the girl living downstairs to bring him his groceries, with what little money he has left. He would rather bury himself in sheets on his lounge, languishing next to his fireplace.

The season brings a sense of deathly quiet with it, the oppressive grey of Moscow calcifying to something impenetrable. He feels caged looking out of his window: White, and grey, with nary a soul wandering the streets. Occasionally, he’ll see a vehicle passing by, belching exhaust. That’s the only regular evidence of life; otherwise, the city lies frozen and dead.

The worst part, what _truly_ drives Boris to stay inside, is the snow. Each flake that falls on his hair, and his skin, is a unique and gut-wrenching memory. The ashes that fell around the reactor building were just as beautiful, and just as soft. These snowflakes cannot be truly clean, anyway: The radiation sticks in the air, and poisons the atmosphere. Every raindrop, every snowflake, every gust of wind may be poisoning him more, and more, until there is nothing left of him at all.

Boris waits for the winter to end. He reads, and he watches, and he hunches over his typewriter. He absorbs the happenings of the state – how it crumbles – writing critique of his former comrades. There is nothing left for him to do, otherwise.

* * *

Boris has had plenty of time to reflect on his mistakes. He’s had all the time in the world.

The obvious one was the one with the greatest personal consequences to his constitution: Stepping even a single foot into the exclusion zone. This is the one that will kill him, he is very well aware. He’s made aware when he has racking, devastating coughing fits in the cold of night, when he cannot finish his breakfast, when he nearly collapses going up a single flight of stairs. How could he forget?

Then there are the other, more troubling mistakes.

The consequences are not personal. He does not feel the physical sting of them, and they are not consuming his vitality by the day. However, these are what weigh heavy on his psyche. These are what prevent him from going to sleep, make him unwilling to leave his bed in the morning. Perhaps they’ll end up killing him, simply by his own self-neglect.

Even after four years, he still reads the reports of children in Belarus dying of thyroid cancers they wouldn’t have otherwise. The old in the Ukraine have been dying quicker, as well, the life sapped from them by the radiation. He even gets his hands on written accounts from people forced from the exclusion zone, some of their families living there for generations even before the revolution.

Then, there’s the matter of Pripyat.

Oh, the lives he would have saved if he were less afraid. Afraid of making a mountain out of a molehill. Afraid of _starting a panic_. Afraid of displeasing the others looming above him in the state hierarchy.

Thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours for people to accumulate enough exposure to greatly increase their risk of an earlier death: Happy couples, enjoying what they have created. Their children, without blame. Adolescents, looking into the future. A multi-generational calamity, a prolonged sickness that would eat away at entire families. At the very least, it would give them great doubt for their future health.

Cancer. Cardiac conditions. Respiratory failure. Infertility. Kidney failure. Fatigue. The psychological scars.

It could have been avoided, had he signed off on it. If he nodded his head and agreed that, yes, better safe than sorry. That an evacuation is a good idea, not an overreaction.

Evacuating the containment zone was not a mistake. _Waiting_ absolutely was.

* * *

Five days. That was all he had, and all they gave him.

Pretending that the invisible risks did not exist did not save them. Running into a bear’s cage and closing one’s eyes would be foolish by any person’s standards – and that is what he did. He wanted _so desperately_ that the illness would simply happen to the workers that he had completely ignored what it might do to him and his comrades.

After all, it was only Legasov who would be vigilant in taking his iodine tablets, who looked concerned when the dosimeter would begin to shriek as a continuous noise. Meanwhile, they joked that he was paranoid.

Look where they were after those five days: faces red and throats dry, eyes bloodshot and hands shaking, carrying around bags to be sick in and too dizzy to write simple reports. The little academic was right, after all.

So, he and his commission were relieved of their duties. For their _health_.

The paternalistic concern was a clever cover, a convenient veil around the party’s true motivations: They were dissatisfied with him, of course. Saving people was not the primary goal of party leadership; it was to preserve the dignity of the Soviet Union. He, and his team, had failed at that. Not only that, but to have a member of the Council of Ministers of the USSR so dangerously irradiated, to the point of being undeniably ill? Bad optics. Foolish.

A very friendly (but very armed) team of Internal Troops of the Ministry for Internal Affairs would escort them to Moscow, with rifles all but pressed into their backs. The nurses at the hospital – bundled in protective clothing and masks, more than his men ever had – treated him with a necessarily polite efficiency, and always kept a careful distance. Boris may have been given his own room in the isolation ward, but he doubted it was any more luxurious than those of the others: The same cracked beige walls, the same yellowed linoleum tile, and the same grey, unpalatable food.

He wasn’t at bedrest for more than five minutes before told him that they needed to incinerate his luggage, as well as the clothes he was wearing when they brought him there. He was also told that they would need to bury much-beloved Brietling watch, after they plied it off his wrist. And, while Boris did not see them take it, there’s no doubt that they must have found and then subsequently burned his personal journal (though it was guaranteed that they transcribed it, first).

This was the cost, the nurse would explain to him, of his irradiation. His dignity, apparently.

As for coming back there to continue his work? Forget about it. Silaev was immediately shoved into his chair the _second_ he stepped foot in Moscow. What did _he_ know? How was he any different? Was aviation that much superior to energy transportation when it came to nuclear fallout? Probably not. Party politicking always found a way to rear its ugly head, even in matters of crisis.

That was it. Boris was told, politely but firmly, to take care of his health. Perhaps it was a mercy, to be forced out of this mess and to see others juggle it. To watch them scramble in failing to preserve appearances, when appearances should not have been the primary concern.

Re: Silaev. It was not criminal, or immoral, of him to take the reigns of the investigation. Boris would have done the same in his position, had he not known what he does now. His mistake was bringing Velikhov, the scientist that Silaev brought along was completely ill-suited for the job. He knew absolutely _nothing_ about reactors, just was a cheerful face that Gorbachev played cards with here and there.

So: Legasov was forced to stay, working to his bones within the exclusion zone. They might have evacuated Boris and his fellows, but the scientist’s mind was indispensable to them. His body, and his mortality? Apparently not.

* * *

Now: Legasov is dead. There’s very little doubt in Boris’ mind that he would not survive past him, even without the noose and the encouragement from being ousted from the Kurchatov Institute. He would have been shot to death by the artillery of the particles punching holes into his body by the second. Boris will die that way as well; each season brings him closer and closer to his fate, to be swallowed by the force that took his career and his plans away from him.

The Politburo session where they (himself, Legasov, and the rest of his Committee) had interrogated Alexandrov, the very man who had contributed to the failures of the RBMK reactor and _himself_ attested to it, did not save them. Of course, Gorbachev himself might have been there nodding along to Legasov’s claims that the faults have been known for fifteen years. He might not even have been pretending to be shocked, that one-hundred and four accidents occurred in that time, but it all ended just the same after the meeting ended: The two of them would be ostracized, and quietly removed from any place of political or scientific significance.

There is some irony that Legasov had been succeeded in his institute by his inept failure of a rival, Velikhov. Just so, how Boris himself was shoved off of the Council of Ministers, as Silaev stayed and flourished in a greater role.

* * *

So, here Boris is: Powerless and alone in a generous state-issued apartment in Moscow, waiting out the rest of his days.

Every publication he reads, each snippet of footage of some carefully edited television interview leaves him with a bitter taste at the back of his mouth, distinct from the that of his flesh peeling from the inside of his cheeks. Yet, he writes. He writes to all who wish to read, he writes to all of those who still listen.

Even knowing every mistake of Chernobyl: The administrative failures, the construction of the reactor, and the incompetence of its people… unlike Legasov to his dying breath, there is still a part of him that _believes_.

Perhaps that is ignorant and blind of him, to believe in a state that has taken away the lives of his friend and colleague, himself, and many others. But… what else, if not to still fight for it? Was he to watch the Soviet Union fall before his very eyes?

When it snows, Boris would rather stay inside.

**Author's Note:**

> JaroÅ¡inskaja, A. A., Bertell, R. & Ehrle, L. H. Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment. (Transaction Publishers, 2011).  
Plokhy, S. Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. (Penguin Books Limited, 2018).  
Higginbotham, A. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. (Transworld, 2019).


End file.
